Shut-upness: Living a lie

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Shut-upness: Living a lie

Those who know say that Kierkegaard (circa 1840) was a psychoanalyst without fear of being laughed at because he knew that the scoffers are uninformed. Few sapiens have such courage born of self-confidence. The noted psychologist Mowrer said “Freud had to live and write before the earlier work of Kierkegaard could be correctly understood and appreciated.” Such, is genius.

Wo/man is a union of polar opposites; self-consciousness and physical body. It is thus “the true essence of man”. “Leading modern psychologists have themselves made it the corner stone of their understanding.”

The evolution into self-consciousness from self-satisfying ignorance inherent in animal nature had one great tragedy for wo/mankind, which is anxiety or dread. It is our very humanness which produces anxiety–dread of death. This anxiety results from the ambiguity of our situation and our inability to overcome such an ambiguity. This ubiquity of ambiguity drives us into the creation of a virtual world in which to live. Self-consciousness cannot be denied, we cannot disappear into a state of vegetation, we cannot flee dread; we can only create delusions–a virtual reality.

The task of the sciences of psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and anthropology are to discover the strategies that humans use to avoid anxiety. How do we function automatically and uncritically in our virtual world and how do these strategies deprive us of true growth and freedom of action?

Today we talk about ‘repression’ and ‘denial’; Kierkegaard, the pioneer, called these same things “shut-upness”. He recognized the ‘half-obscurity’ in which wo/man lives her life, he recognized that man recognizes the truth of ceremony, how many times to bow when walking past the altar, he knows things in the same way that a pupil uses ABC of a mathematical expression but not when it is changed to DEF. “He is therefore in dread whenever he hears something not arranged in the same order.”

[b]Shut-upness is what we today call repression. Kierkegaard recognized a “lofty shut-upness” and a “mistaken shut-upness”. It is important that a child be reared in a lofty shut-upness, i.e. reserve, because it represents an ego-controlled and self-confident perception of the world.

Mistaken shut-upness, however, results “in too much blockage, too much anxiety, too much effort to face up to experience by an organism that has been overburdened and weakened in its own controls…more automatic repression by an essentially closed personality”. Good is openness to new possibilities and evil is closed to such possibility.

Shut-upness is called, by Kierkegaard, “the lie of character”. “It is easy to see that shut-upness eo ipso signifies a lie, or, if you prefer, untruth. But untruth is precisely unfreedom…the elasticity of freedom is consumed in the service of close reserve…Close reserve was the effect of the negating retrenchment of the ego in the individuality.”[/b]

This ‘lie of character’ is developed by the infant’s need to adjust to the world. This unfreedom becomes mistaken shut-upness when the character becomes too fearful of the world to open itself up to its possibilities. Such individuals become ‘inauthentic’; they are not their own person; they follow a life style that becomes automatic and uncritical, they become locked in tradition. This infant grows up becoming the ‘automatic cultural-man’.

“Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs…Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial”.

Quotes from “The Denial of Death”; Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction by Ernest Becker.

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I had posted a question on why some people have taken the path of hiding themselves from the realities of life and installing themselves in their version of events and that answers it beautifully thank you.

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no argument, seems like pretty well drawn out conclutions.

thanks, good read.

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Is it really the dread of death? If Heidegger said death was beyond representation than Derrida was right to ask: how can we be affected by something which negates being? Anxiety from nonbeing sounds absurd.

It is not that people hide from the realities of life, its that life has no realities. If I were to find this reality where would it be hiding? Is it somewhere out there? Anything you define as true or take for granted can reveal a rupture and incoherence: science, politics, society, religion, logic, language, perception, discourse.

What is animal nature and how is it distinct from human nature? Why the anthropocentricism?

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Arthritis

Humans have an animal nature plus they have something else. Some people call this something else consciousness, or soul, or mind, or spirit etc. One of the distinctions from other animals is a consciousness of mortality. This leads to a dread of death and an attempt for immortality.

[b]How can we, the “man on the street”, Tom & Jane, gain an insight into the meaning of this dread of death? A dread so strong that we kill to prevent that death and that we are so dedicated to repressing that dread that many things we do is done in that behalf.

I suspect most of us have experienced the feeling we call ‘claustrophobia’. I have experienced that feeling and I am confident that I would do almost anything to stop that experience. I suspect that it was the dread of death that caused the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps to tolerate such terror as daily existence must have been for those imprisoned in those camps.

I suspect that dread of death is the reason that ‘water-boarding’ is such a popular form of torture. Torture is, I suspect, an effort to induce that same dread that we experience in a claustrophobic episode. I think that we might properly use the metaphor ‘dread of death is claustrophobia’ or perhaps ‘dread of death is water-boarding’.[/b]

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I like this analysis. Torture and the spectacle of public execution was traditionally employed as the means of a sovereign to emphasis his absolute authority over the body of a subject. It is also a form of interrogation but the power relation is the same. What better way to gain power than by facing the subject with the prospect of death? Torture can be employed in many less painful methods then: the very pursuit of survival which we pursue everyday in all its forms.

On death I disagree. Angst, or anxiety is not the fear of death, but the confrontation with nothing. Angst occurs when all things suddenly lose meaning, when everyday objects become devoid of purpose and we are confronted with the totality of what is. Angst is not a fear of something factically present (like a shark or dangerous dog) but it is a fear of existence itself- the fear of closed possibilities. Death is the closing of all possibilities but death itself is without representation (we cannot experience death or ‘find’ death anywhere).

You mentioned psychoanalysis. Freud refers to the death instinct, in which an organism desires its own death or annihiliation, contradicting the commonly held assumption that all organisms defend themselves against death. So perhaps even the assertion that our lives are driven by the fear of death is not even reliable.

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Arthritis

The human sciences seem to have developed a consensus that our fundamental drive is the dread of death. Science seems also to agree that humans go to great lengths to deceive them self. So it is little wonder if we have a difficult time accepting this idea. I think it is a major mistake for us to ignore what all of the great thinkers have concluded because it just not fit into our common sense perceptions.

It is important for us to make the effort to comprehend what the human sciences tell us. The survival of our species may well depend upon our ability to comprehend what is our nature and to make changes in our social structure to fit our nature.

It appears to me that the fear of death and the fear of nothingness are the same thing.

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So realistically the more we do something the more desensitised we are to it. So therefore the more we do such things like extreme sports then little by little we are coming to terms with our own mortality. I wonder if this is why when people who have lived a more fulfilled life they are more calm and accepting when they get old as they have desensitised themselves to their impending doom?

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I think you are right on the mark. This points up the importance of acquiring a critical frame of mind and also developing a self-actualizing self-learning life style as we mature.

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It seems that it can be a perpetual cycle for some that as the years go by the are unable to break their own conditioning and move forwards, effectively stunting their own growth through the inability to overcome their own fear. So i belive that a person can be infleunced by their expercinces but it is ultimatly up to them to choose their own path either reinforce their negative patterns or break free from them.

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This is the kind of existential nihilist BS that makes me sick, to disregard all the proof of reality in cause and effect and claim the obvious doesn’t exist even though the majority has always recognized it to be real, and to do this in the name of some kind of pseudo intellectual deep better then thou thought is just disgusting. This is the product of the most retarded and foundless defective thinking I know of, I believe it is called believing you own bullshit and slipping in it.

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Ok. Take a deeper look at everyday discourse, everyday ‘common sense’ and little by little it can be broken down to an incoherent contradiction. What you think is sound and logical now will one day be dimissed as nonsense and ignorance, just as we have looked back at our own ancestors as ‘backward’ ‘racist’ ‘brutal’ ‘fanatical’, all arbitrary labels that we too will have marked upon us.

Rather than kill ourselves trying to find the ‘truth’ we ought to just sit back and enjoy the show- experience the joy of living.

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All interactions, all relationships, depend on a certain amount of repression.
Our comfort increases as we grow accustomed to the repression, almost forgeting it or becomning convinced that we are nor repressing anything, or as we gain power and can, therefore, exhibit ourselves more freely.

We call friends those in whose company we repress the least and so feel more at ease.

Civilization is built on repression.
In fact civility is a term denoting a socially desirable level of repression we can also call self-control.

This repression is the sacrifice an individual entity makes, or is forced to make due to its disadvantage, so as to become acceptable and tolerable to a group.

It is why all social unities produce neurosis to some degree or another.

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agreeable to point, though life seems built apon humor more so than repression, being that we have drive to live and not die. and we were all born so its not worth really arguing. this is always achievable in some fashion or another, whether pleasure be the goal or the motivation, it’s self reavealing, only misunderstood or to be.we would not live long without others, the question rather is condition(s),beautiful machine(s) really,human being(s).wink